About Oliver Marsden

In his luminous, abstract paintings, drawings, and prints, Oliver Marsden transforms light, color, sound, vibrations, water, and other sensations and natural phenomena into pigment and line on canvas or paper, exploring and celebrating the process of perception. His inspirations range from nature and science to Buddhism, the Light & Space environments of James Turrell, and the woodblock prints of Katsushika Hokusai. “Turrell makes form out of light,” he explains. “I try the reverse: to make substance seem immaterial, to create a virtual perceived space in the mind of the viewer.” He works in series, concentrating on a single perceptual phenomenon. In his “Fade” series (begun 2004) of acrylic-on-canvas paintings, Marsden captures the resonance of light in the eye and mind, and the harmony between different colors, through subtly graded hues that fade into each other across the picture plane.